Flow regimes of the superfluid helium caused by oscillating quartz tuning fork

The laminar-turbulent flow transition in HeII was studied with an oscillating quartz tuning fork. At temperatures from 200 mK to 3.0 K a current-voltage characteristic were recorded with varying driving voltage from 10-5 to 10 V. A resonance frequency and a width of the resonance curve were also registered. It is found that at temperatures below ~ 0.8 K the laminar-turbulent transition proceeds through an intermediate region clearly seen in the current - voltage characteristic curves. In this case the resonance curve changes in its shape - there appears a plateau near the maximum. An increase in the resonance curve width suggests the existence of excess dissipation related to the generation of quantized vortices in HeII in the vicinity of the oscillating surface. Estimation of the possible size of the vortices may suggest that these are generated on the oscillating surface roughness.